Bouyon: Stories
Date Available
4-24-3000
Year of Publication
2024
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
English
Advisor
Dr. Shauna Morgan
Abstract
Bouyon is a collection of short stories exploring braided subjects of Black intergenerational mother/daughter dynamics, return migration, and diasporic notions of home. In this work I imagine possibilities for Haitian women and girls to make home through return–cultural, spiritual, and physical. The characters must confront their complex identities, while also navigating nuanced understandings of community, belonging, and lineage. Bouyon is written in the tradition of Black feminist and Caribbean writers such as Edwidge Danticat and Miriam J. Chancy. The stories in this collection indulge the lyrical, poetic, and mystical reaches of language to build images and motifs that echo within each story and throughout the larger work. This thesis also pays attention to artist and anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse’s clarion call for “new narratives” about Haiti. Each story’s engagement with Black female experiences, set in a contemporary Haitian context, is a political act in defiance of extractive imaginations of migration. The work stands as a refusal to eulogize a homeland and culture while it continues to struggle and survive. Equal parts grief, longing, and radical hope, Bouyon is a heartfelt contribution to Haitian literature, to Black feminist creative scholarship, and to the memory and future of Ayiti.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2024.186
Recommended Citation
Bowen, Savannah, "Bouyon: Stories" (2024). Theses and Dissertations--English. 172.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/172
